Welcome to Change Makers, our series highlighting customer stories and builders making an incredible impact with Airtable. Today’s Change Maker leads the Airtable Media and Entertainment Group, a space for any and all Airtable users in education.
Meet Max, Founder of Relationl
😗 What's a fun fact most people (or your coworkers) don't know about you?
I can whistle and hum at the same time.
🫖 Coffee, tea, or something else entirely to fuel your workday?
I don't drink coffee.
💻 What's the first thing you ever built with Airtable?
In 2020 I built a B2C marketplace app in Bubble called Lauunch, which was like 99Designs for viral TikTok trends. We synced the database into Airtable to manage analytics workflows.
🗯️ What advice would you give to someone just getting started with Airtable?
Start with the Formula Playground.
The Challenge & Airtable Solution
Max Bernstein (
"In 2020, my music marketing agency, record label, and management company were all taking off at once, and our spreadsheets were falling apart," Max explains. "When I discovered Airtable, it handed me, as a non-technical founder, the power to design my own solution."
Max's innovative solution leverages Airtable AI's Omni to automatically generate new bases from a documented schema. The system consists of tables for Projects, Tables, Fields, and Field Types, with a series of rollup fields that concatenate these details into an AI-ready prompt. This prompt then instructs Omni to build a complete relational base with all tables, lookups, and rollups correctly configured.
"For the first time, I could build custom software that worked exactly the way my business needed it to, not the way someone else imagined it should. That freedom was intoxicating."
📺 Want to see it in action? Max shared a demo of this workflow at Airtable's Media & Entertainment User Group.
The Results
The impact of Max's Omni Base Development Prompt Builder has been transformative:
- Base creation time reduced from approximately 6 hours to under 30 minutes—a 90% improvement
- Lookup and rollup relationships built automatically, eliminating manual field setup errors
- Standardized field naming and schema structure across all new bases
- Error-free linking between relational tables
The solution has enabled Relationl to spin up new client systems instantly, creating a repeatable template for building entire departments' tools. Perhaps most importantly, it ensures that bases are properly documented from the start, rather than as an afterthought.
What's Next
Nothing new for this project! However, you can follow along and learn from Max’s many projects with clients by joining the Airtable Media & Entertainment User Group where he hosts monthly events dedicated to bettering your Airtable skills.
Copy & Paste AI Prompt
You’ll find the prompt in Max’s video above, but here is the prompt fully written out below:
Please create the following Tables and corresponding Fields. The list of fields below is formatted as:
'Field Name' [Field Type]: Additional clarifying information
Do not add any lookup or rollup fields until after all the tables and other non-lookup and non-rollup fields have been added. Then and only then should you go back and add all the lookup and rollup fields to their corresponding tables.
Please generate each field exactly as described. Do not create any additional fields that are not listed below. Feel free to ask me clarifying question before you begin.
Table: Projects
- 'Name' [Formula, primary field]: Title & " - " & Status
- 'Date' [Date]
- 'Title' [Single line text]
- 'Status' [Single select]: New, In Progress, Complete
Table: Messages
- 'Name' [Formula, primary field]: Subject
- 'Summary' [Rollup]: of "Details" field from Project Messages table using arrayjoin(values,"\n\n")
- 'Body' [Long text]
- 'Last sent' [Rollup]: of "Sent on" field from Organization Messages table using max(values)
- 'Subject' [Single line text]
- 'Date' [Date]
Table: Contacts
- 'Organization' [Link to Organizations, allow one]
- 'Name' [Formula]: First&" "&Last
- 'First' [Single line text]
- 'Last' [Single line text]
- 'Email' [Email]
Table: Organizations
- 'Name' [Single line text, primary field]
- 'Email (from Contacts)' [Lookup]: of the Email field from all linked Contacts
- 'Tags' [Multiple select]: Print, Digital, Other
Table: Project Messages
- 'Name' [Formula, primary field]: Project& " - " &Message
- 'Message' [Link to Messages, allow one]
- 'Project' [Link to Projects, allow one]
- 'Title (from Project)' [Lookup]: of the Title field from all linked Project
- 'Status (from Project)' [Lookup]: of the Status field from all linked Project
- 'Date (from Project)' [Lookup]: of the Date field from all linked Project
- 'Details' [Long text]
Table: Organization Messages
- 'Name' [Formula, primary field]: Organization& " - " &Message
- 'Organization' [Link to Organizations, allow one]
- 'Message' [Link to Messages, allow one]
- 'Email (from Contacts) (From Organization)' [Lookup]: of the 'Email (from Contacts)' field from all linked Organizations
- 'Name (from Organization)' [Lookup]: of the 'Name' field from the Organizations table
- 'Customization' [Single line text]
- 'Status' [Single select]: Staged, Ready, Sent
- 'Sent on' [Date]
- 'Ready to send' [Checkbox]
Did this use case inspire you? Drop a comment below if you try Max’s prompt to build a base, and share how you’re using Airtable to change the way you work for a chance to be our next Change Maker spotlight!